TREVOR BERBICK SPENT THE LAST night of his life socializing. He attended a party at Miss Dorraine’s Bar in Norwich, where he ate bread and chicken and danced enthusiastically to World Beat music, some of the selections there being made by his nephew, Harold. Shortly before midnight, he ended up at McCarthy’s Bar. There, he made small talk with the bartender, Christine Davis, then sat at the end of the counter and watched television. He was a regular in the establishment, though staff never remembered seeing him drinking heavily nor causing trouble in any way.
He left McCarthy’s around 1:00 a.m. on Saturday and started to walk back to his mother’s house in Norwich, the place he now called home. Since returning to Jamaica, he’d had his share of problems: squabbles with his family and run-ins with the law. Yet earlier that month he’d given an interview to a local paper in which he sounded optimistic about his future. He’d fallen back in love with fishing, claimed to have plans to develop some property, and dreamt of opening a gym to coach youngsters. He was even in the market for a screenwriter to pitch Hollywood the story of his extraordinary life.
As was his custom when he neared home, Berbick took a short cut through the Church of God premises, using his cell phone to illuminate a path. At this hour of the night, however, it was still dark enough for two men to be lurking in the shadows, wielding a crowbar and a four-foot-long metal pipe, waiting for his arrival.
“He was coming up the church steps mumbling,” said twenty-year-old Harold Berbick, one of the assailants, in a statement to police. “He had a phone in his hand with the light turn on when him pass me. He could not see us and I use the piece of iron to lick him in his head back twice. I was aiming for his neck and shoulder but it catch him in his head. He held his head with both hands and bend forward and Sheldon [nickname of the co-accused, eighteen-year-old Kenton Gordon] use the crowbar and hit him two times in his head also. Uncle Trevor drop to the ground and try to bawl out in a low voice and tried to get up but when he was getting up Sheldon hit him in his head two more times and he dropped to the ground.”
The post-mortem examination revealed that Trevor Berbick died due to massive brain damage and hemorrhaging caused by repeated blows to the head by blunt objects. The coroner estimated that his death occurred within half an hour of him being first struck.
Harold Berbick had no previous convictions. During the trial, he claimed he was afraid of his uncle, and that at Miss Dorraine’s on the night of October 27 he had made threatening gestures towards him from across the room, including repeatedly dragging a finger across his throat. The pair had a long-standing acrimonious relationship, and there had also been a violent incident between Harold’s mother, Gwendolyn Facey, and Trevor earlier in the year, about which a case had been pending.
On December 20, 2007, a jury took just over an hour to find Harold guilty of murder; he was sentenced to life with a recommendation he spend at least twenty years in jail. Kenton Gordon was convicted of manslaughter, for which he received fourteen years hard labor.
“It is wrong to murder someone, justice has been served,” said Berbick’s ex-wife, Nadine, who had sat through the proceedings with two of his daughters, Trisha and Nadia. “He should not have died the way he did.”